Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday May 05, 2009 @10:37AM
from the now-that's-just-stunning dept.

mmmscience writes with this excerpt from Examiner.com: "A study coming out of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found that the influenza virus manages to dysregulate the immune system, allowing other infections to thrive in the body. This discovery, coming at an opportune time as the world battles the new H1N1 flu outbreak, may be the first step in understanding why the flu can cause such high mortality rates in normally healthy individuals."

"they also found a decreased response of toll-like receptors, which activate immune cell responses as a result of invading microbes."

The latter is not only an accurate accounting of the result, it doesn't overgeneralize the implications. The mechanism studied is only part of the highly complex immune system. The results do not suggest, as does the headline, that the entire immune system gets hosed.

Swine flu is scary. Flus change quickly, it's already resistant to two of our antivirals, and it initially appeared to be spreading like a motherfucker. Might be it still is: the low numbers reported are WHO confirmed cases, which, by their nature, will almost always be lower than the actual cases.

Most likely it won't get bad. Might be it won't even infect anyone. But if it does, and we haven't taken appropriate precautions, we're gonna look pretty fucking stupid if our only explanation for that is your post.

It's seems odd that the general acceptance of the cytokine storm creating an overabundance of T-Cell and Macrophages is now being questioned. Everything written so far has indicated that the stronger the patient's immune system, the greater the response.

I'd wait until we see a peer reviewed study in a major medical journal.